Ebb Tide at Miami Beach

From prosperity to torpor in two decades

Hyperbolic drumbeaters still proclaim Miami Beach as "the sun and fun capital of the world" to big spenders from the North. The reality, as first-time visitors will speedily discover during the tourist season that opens this week, is startlingly different. The sun is still there (temperatures last week were in the 80s), but not the fun. So rapidly has the seven-mile-long island degenerated that it can be fairly described as a seedy backwater of debt-ridden hotels, gaudy condominiums and decaying apartments. It has a permanent population so old (median age: 68) that lifeguards spend more time assisting heart-attack victims on the sand than pulling foundering swimmers out of the surf.

The signs of decay are almost universal. The 1,250-room Fontainebleau Hotel--so haughty in its heyday that Comedian Alan King joshed that it charged him $25 a day, not for accommodation but merely to use its name --was sold early this month in bankruptcy court. Next door, the Eden Roc has just emerged from years in receivership. Once it featured entertainers like Harry Belafonte and Wayne Newton; this winter its "headliners" will be its own singing waiters. At least three other hotels are tangled in bankruptcy proceedings; vacant stores dot the island, and even the members of the world's oldest profession have drifted elsewhere to more prosperous locations. No new hotel has opened in a decade; tourist spending in that period has fallen a precipitous 43% by one estimate, and revenues of some establishments have dropped as much as 50%.

True, tourist traffic may be higher this winter than during last year's disastrous season, if only because the weather probably will not be so bad again (temperatures dropped into the 30s last January). But convention business, which has become crucial to what prosperity the Beach has left, is likely to fall off by a fifth this year. The American College of Surgeons and several other large groups have vowed never to return until more first-class hotel rooms are available. At present, only 3,500 of Miami Beach's 27,000 hotel rooms rate that designation.

Says Mel Mendelson, owner of a meat-packing plant, who has been observing the scene for a quarter of a century: "Miami Beach reminds you of a New York subway." From a more scientific viewpoint, Frank Borman, the former astronaut who is now chairman of Eastern Air Lines, concluded from his company's research that "the Beach is dying as a tourist attraction." Eastern's figures reveal that as recently as 1971, more than four out of ten visitors arriving in Florida headed for the Miami area. Last year the figure was fewer than three out often.

One reason for the decline is the popularity of competing resorts. While the number of hotel rooms in Miami Beach fell by 3,000 during the past decade, Las Vegas added 15,000 and Hawaii, prospering on cheap air charters, increased its total by more than 27,000 rooms. Low-cost tourist packages ($319 for travel and lodging in London; only $355 for a return flight from New York to Casablanca) have drawn away the younger set, while retired sun seekers have been lured to Mexico, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. The surprising boom of the Caribbean cruise business added to the damage; many a visitor this winter will merely ride through the Miami area en route from mainland airport to cruise-ship dock. A helter-skelter condominium boom that began in Miami Beach in the early '60s siphoned off tourists who had been paying $60 a day in the better hotels for the winter season. The result, as Hal Cohen, executive director of the Beach's Tourist Development Authority, explains, is that "hotels must now sell a room to six different people that formerly went to one."

The latest blow has been the extraordinary success of the Walt Disney World theme park and entertainment center at Orlando, 240 miles to the north. The 27,400-acre complex, which opened in 1971, sports three Disney hotels, with an occupancy rate of about 97%, three golf courses and assorted attractions that make it, according to its owners, the No. 1 tourist destination in the world. More than 13 million visitors came in 1976, and attendance in this year's fourth quarter is up 7.4% over a year ago. Moreover, the Disney complex, which grossed almost $255 million last year, drew other hoteliers and so has driven the price of land from $200 an acre in 1971 to as much as $100,000 today. With almost 40,000 first-class rooms, Orlando's hotels are attracting some conventions, notably the 1978 congress of the International Chamber of Commerce. Walt Disney World is adding 144 rooms to one of its existing hotels and is contemplating construction of yet another hostelry. "We were cut off at the pass by Disney World," laments L. A. Baker, executive vice president of the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce.

Miami Beach hotelkeepers, however, have only themselves to blame for much of their troubles. Though the notion of converting the island of swamps and snakes, mud and mangroves was the brainchild of Carl Fisher, a promoter of the Indianapolis Speedway, the modern sprawl of wall-to-wall hotels is in large measure the legacy of Ben Novack, operator until October of the Fontainebleau. Novack had the cunning of a Talleyrand when it came to raising money (one wag suggested that the hotel had as many investors as there were rooms), but little aesthetic sense. The Fontainebleau, which opened with ruffles and flourishes in 1954 and charged as much as $125 a day then for a suite, was a semicircular rococo monument that set the architectural style for the hotel building boom of the '50s. During the 1968 Republican Convention, Norman Mailer visited most of the big hotels and concluded, "All the rivers of the very worst taste twisted down to the delta of each lobby in each grand Miami Beach hotel . . . There was every color of iridescence, rainbows of vulgarity, aureoles of gorgeous taste, opium den of a middle-class dollar, materialistic as meat, sweat and the cigar." Even the merrymaking had a mechanical touch. According to one ancient joke, at 4 o'clock one midseason morning in the '50s, a woman threw open her hotel-room window and screamed "Fire! Fire!" A thousand sleepy voices replied, "Cha cha cha."

The tourists spent so heavily that hotelkeepers thought they could continue taking heavy profits out of their establishments without putting any money back into renovation. Novack, in particular, used much of the money from the Fontainebleau to finance outside ventures that never paid off. Meanwhile, his hotel and others deteriorated; a visitor to the Fontainebleau last week noted a bucket strategically placed on the 14th floor to catch water from a dripping pipe. Another visitor in the past was not enamored by the presence of snarling guard dogs. Hotels sectioned off the once magnificent beach so that it is now invisible from much of Collins Avenue, the main thoroughfare, causing erosion that in some spots has left little or no beach.

For all its vicissitudes, Miami Beach has long been a favorite playground for organized crime chiefs. Al Capone died there; Meyer Lansky, after a worldwide odyssey in search of amenable digs, settled into one of those beachfront condominiums. The rakish, raffish atmosphere that such residents helped to create may have attracted some visitors, but it has repulsed others.

It is ironic, therefore, that the hotelmen are now looking to legalized gambling for their salvation. Sanford Weiner, the publicist who helped push through the referendum in New Jersey that will bring craps and slot machines to Atlantic City, has been retained to head the effort, even though Governor Reubin Askew has vowed to fight such an idea. "Gambling would change our image overnight," says Beach Tourist Chief Cohen. "It would combat the feeling that there's nothing to do here." Agrees Joel Gray, executive vice president of the Doral Hotel: "Gambling can return Miami Beach to a point of prime destination." In other words, Gray thinks casinos will lure many more travelers. But these optimists have forgotten the need for fresh capital. Says Morton Ehrlich, senior vice president for planning of Eastern Air Lines: "You don't put a casino in the basement of a hotel that's falling down." And Miami Beach boosters are having great difficulty raising new money these days. Says one hotelkeeper: "We are ready to build a new hotel, but we can't get the money. There is too much negativism. The bankers are gun-shy."

The Army Corps of Engineers is restoring the beach. There is talk of building a model of Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens on Watson Island, which is connected to the Beach and the mainland by one of four causeways. Another proposal is to renew South Beach, at a cost of $500 million. The area now attracts winos and beach bums to its sleazy hotels and littered alleys. Despite everything, Miami Beach still has the assets of pleasant climate and huge convention facilities, while businessmen have appealed for $100 million in Government guarantees and outright loans to refurbish and expand the big hotels. And Beach officials are trying to rectify the reputation of resort employees for surliness to tourists. The officials have held special sessions with cab drivers and hotel workers to coach them in etiquette, and passed out buttons to employees reading: BUTTER 'EM UP.

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